If he’s noticed the change in me, he gives no indication. He smiles sweetly and tucks a strand of hair behind my ear. This is it, I realize. I’m about to kiss a nice, handsome man on an unplanned date in an unfamiliar place. This is how the story’s supposed to go, and it finally is.
His forehead lowers toward mine, and my phone chimes in my bag.
Instantly, another window glows bright in my mind. Another apartment. Mine.
The squashy floral couch, the endless stacks of books, my favorite Jo Malone candle burning on the mantel. Me lounging in an antique robe and a sheet mask with a shiny new manuscript, and on the far side of the couch, a man with a furrowed brow, mouth in a knot, book in hand.
Charlie, hitting my brain like an Alka-Seltzer tab, dispersing in every direction.
My face jerks sideways. Shepherd stops short, his mouth hovering an inch shy of my cheek. “I should be getting back to my sister!” It comes out unplanned and roughly sixty times louder than I meant for it to. But I can’t go through with this. My brain feels too muddy.
Shepherd draws back, vaguely puzzled, and smiles good-naturedly. “Well, if you ever need a tour guide again . . .” He reaches into his shirt pocket and pulls out a scrap of paper and a blue Bic pen, scribbling against it in his palm. “Don’t be a stranger.” He hands me the number, then hesitates for a second before saying, “Or even if you don’t need a tour guide.”
“Yeah,” I stammer. “I’ll call you.” Once I figure out what’s going on in my head.
* * *
Charlie pushes my coffee across the counter. “Precisely on time,” he says. “So I guess Shepherd didn’t break your city-person curse.”
For some reason, his confirmation that he did see me getting into the truck yesterday rankles. Like it’s proof that he purposely invaded my thoughts.
I tuck my sunglasses atop my head and stop at the desk. “We had a very nice time. Thanks so much for asking.” I’m mad at him. I’m mad at me. I’m just generally, irrationally mad.
Charlie’s jaw muscles leap. “Where’d he take you? The Creamy Whip in the next town over? Or the Walmart parking lot for some truck-bed stargazing?”
“Careful, Charlie,” I say. “That sounds like jealousy.”
“It’s relief,” he says. “I expected you to show up here today in Daisy Dukes and pigtails, maybe a Ford tattoo on your tailbone.”
I slide my forearms onto the desk and lean forward in such a way that I really might as well have brought a silver platter out and presented my cleavage to him that way. The lack of sleep is really getting to me. I feel haunted by him, and I’m determined to haunt him right back.
“I would be”—I drop my voice—“adorable in Daisy Dukes and pigtails.”
His eyes snap back to my face, flashing; his mouth twitches through that grimacing pout, a pair as reliable as thunder and lightning. “Not the word I’d use.”
Awareness sizzles down my backbone. I lean closer. “Charming?”
His eyes stay on my face. “Not that either.”
“Sweet,” I say.
“No.”
“Comely?” I guess.
“Comely? What year is it, Stephens?”
“A real girl next door,” I parry.
He snorts. “Whose door?”
I straighten. “It’ll come to me.”
“I doubt it,” he says under his breath.
The self-satisfaction lasts about as long as it takes to set up in the café and pull up my checklist for today’s tasks. There are proposals I didn’t finish marking up yesterday, queries I need to send on delayed payments, and submissions lists I need to solidify before the slow season ends.
Once again my work needs my full attention, and once again I can’t compartmentalize enough to make that happen. Last night’s dinner with Libby keeps spiraling through my mind like flaming butterflies. She was effusively chipper, no sign of anything wrong, until I pressed her on her mysterious errands, at which point her energy flagged and her eyes hardened.
“Can’t a grown woman have a little alone time?” she said. “I think I’ve earned the right to a little privacy.” And that was that. We’d brushed the awkwardness aside, but the rest of the night, some of that distance had come back into her eyes, a secret looming between us like a glass wall or a block of ice, more or less invisible but decidedly material.
I open Dusty’s pages and picture myself in a submarine, sinking into them, urging the world around me to dull. It’s never taken effort—that’s what made me fall in love with reading: the instant floating sensation, the dissolution of real-world problems, every worry suddenly safely on the other side of some metaphysical surface. Today is different.
The bells chime at the front of the shop, and a familiar, feminine purr of a voice greets Charlie. He responds warmly, and she gives a sexy laugh. I can’t make out every word, but every few sentences are punctuated by that same gravelly sound.
Amaya, I realize, as she’s saying something like, “Are we still on for Friday?”
Charlie says something like, “Still works for me.”
And my brain says something like, DOESN’T WORK FOR ME. NOT AT ALL.
To which the career woman angel on my shoulder replies, Shut up and mind your own business. He’s not supposed to occupy any of your mental real estate anyway.
I put on headphones and blast my cityscape sounds to make myself stop listening in, but not even the dulcet tones of New York City’s finest cabdrivers cussing one another out is enough to soothe me.
Charlie said Amaya wasn’t jilted, which more than likely means she broke up with him. I don’t want to be following this thought out to its logical conclusion, but my brain is a runaway train, smashing through station after station with unrelenting speed.
Charlie didn’t want the relationship to end.
Amaya regrets her decision now.
Things are complicated for Charlie. Whatever’s going on between him and me “can’t be anything.”
Charlie’s keeping the door open to something with his ex.
Amaya just asked him out.
I mean, that’s only one possible through line, but that’s how my brain works: it plots.
This is why crushes are terrible. You go from feeling like life is a flat path one needs only to cruise over to spending every second on an incline, or caught in a weightless, stomach-in-your-throat drop. It’s Mom running out to catch a cab, hair curled and smiling lips painted, only to come home with streaks of mascara down her face. Highs and lows, and nothing in between.